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Francis Crick - Biographical

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born
on June 8th, 1916, at Northampton, England, being the elder child
of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins. He has one brother,
A. F. Crick, who is a doctor in New Zealand.

Crick was educated at Northampton Grammar School and Mill Hill
School, London. He studied physics at University College,
London, obtained a B.Sc. in 1937, and started research for a
Ph.D. under Prof E. N. da C. Andrade, but this was interrupted by
the outbreak of war in 1939. During the war he worked as a
scientist for the British Admiralty, mainly in connection with
magnetic and acoustic mines. He left the Admiralty in 1947 to
study biology.

Supported by a studentship from the Medical Research
Council and with some financial help from his family, Crick
went to Cambridge and worked at the Strangeways Research
Laboratory. In 1949 he joined the Medical Research Council Unit
headed by M. F.
Perutz of which he has been a member ever since. This Unit
was for many years housed in the Cavendish Laboratory
Cambridge, but in 1962 moved into a large new building - the
Medical
Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology - on the New
Hospital site. He became a research student for the second time
in 1950, being accepted as a member of Caius College,
Cambridge, and obtained a Ph.D. in 1954 on a thesis entitled
«X-ray diffraction: polypeptides and proteins».

During the academic year 1953-1954 Crick was on leave of absence
at the Protein Structure Project of the Brooklyn Polytechnic in
Brooklyn, New York. He has also lectured at Harvard, as a
Visiting Professor, on two occasions, and has visited other
laboratories in the States for short periods.

In 1947 Crick knew no biology and practically no organic
chemistry or crystallography, so that much of the next few years
was spent in learning the elements of these subjects. During this
period, together with W. Cochran and V. Vand he worked out the
general theory of X-ray diffraction by a helix, and at the same
time as L.
Pauling and R. B. Corey, suggested that the alpha-keratin
pattern was due to alpha-helices coiled round each other.

A critical influence in Crick's career was his friendship,
beginning in 1951, with J. D. Watson,
then a young man of 23, leading in 1953 to the proposal of the
double-helical structure for DNA and the replication scheme.
Crick and Watson subsequently suggested a general theory for the
structure of small viruses.

Crick in collaboration with A. Rich has proposed structures for
polyglycine II and collagen and (with A. Rich, D. R. Davies, and
J. D.Watson) a structure for polyadenylic acid.

In recent years Crick, in collaboration with S. Brenner, has
concentrated more on biochemistry and genetics leading to ideas
about protein synthesis (the «adaptor hypothesis»), and
the genetic code, and in particular to work on acridine-type
mutants.

Crick was made an F.R.S. in 1959. He was awarded the Prix Charles
Leopold Meyer of the French Academy of Sciences in 1961, and the
Award of Merit of the Gairdner Foundation in 1962. Together with
J. D. Watson he was a Warren Triennial Prize Lecturer in 1959 and
received a Research Corporation Award in 1962. With J. D. Watson
and M. H. F. Wilkins he was presented
with a Lasker Foundation Award in 1960. In 1962 he was elected a
Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a
Fellow of University College, London. He was a Fellow of Churchill
College, Cambridge, in 1960-1961, and is now a non-resident
Fellow of the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego,
California.

In 1940 Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd. Their son, Michael F. C.
Crick is a scientist. They were divorced in 1947. In 1949 Crick
married Odile Speed. They have two daughters, Gabrielle A. Crick
and Jacqueline M. T. Crick. The family lives in a house
appropriately called «The Golden Helix», in which Crick
likes to find his recreation in conversation with his
friends.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and first
published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.